These words of a celebrated French novelist and playwright, Ludovic Halévy, are worthy of attention:
"We must not write simply for the refined, the blasé, and the squeamish. We must write for that man who goes there on the street with his nose in his newspaper and his umbrella under his arm. We must write for that fat, breathless woman whom I see from my window, as she climbs painfully into the Odéon omnibus. We must write courageously for the bourgeois, if it were only to try to refine them, to make them less bourgeois. And if I dared, I should say that we must write even for fools."
3. A High Quality of Imagination Demanded
Another well-known French dramatist, Marcel Prevost, who is a photoplaywright as well, in a recent issue of the Paris Figaro replied to a question whether motion pictures are harmful to the legitimate theatre, by stating that, while he likes the pictures, their authors are lacking in imagination.
That there is a great deal of truth in what M. Prevost says seems to be proved by the fact that when famous playwrights and best-selling authors have supplied photoplay plots to the manufacturers, they have been exceptionally well paid. We refer, of course, to stories specially written for the photoplay stage, for when a film manufacturer produces a story by a well-known fiction writer, which originally appeared in novel or in short-story form, the manufacturer does business with the author's publishers, unless the author has specifically reserved for himself all dramatic rights—a practice which, by the way, is becoming more and more general.
An editorial in Motography says: "The best motion picture dramas produced today are reproductions of literary classics. These films do not achieve immortality; they merely further assure the immortality of the original work. Why cannot a photodrama be produced that is fine enough to live on its own merit—why must the picture always seem to be secondary while literature and the drama continue to furnish the primary motives?
Arrangement of Electric Lights in a Photoplay Studio
An Actor's Dressing Room in the Selig Studio